Baker Velma Jean Elliott works in her station at The Kitchen Pantry. (Jeff Shane/ Daily Record)

S he loves to cook, but when she was diagnosed with celiac disease, she had to learn a new way of doing things.

It started when Velma Jean Elliott moved to Colorado, where she learned she needed to be on a gluten free diet.

"It was like starting life all over again because it made such a difference," she said. "I love to cook, (and) I like to bake. I've always done a lot of it so at a later age in life, I had to learn to do it all over again because everything about cooking without gluten is different than what you know about cooking otherwise."

As part of the process, she visited with Gloria Stultz at the Kitchen Pantry, who asked her to offer the gluten free products at the store.

"You can't work with wheat, rye or barley," Elliott said. "They all contain a gluten that's poisonous to people who have gluten allergies, like taking an overdose of sugar if you're a diabetic."

During the last several years, she has learned about various ingredients that make up flour, such as tapioca, cornstarch, sorghum, brown rice and white rice, millet and a long list of items. Each one has a property that's usable but is not complete on its own. So she has learned to mix the various ingredients to get the same consistency as white flour.

"Each one will have a certain quality," Elliott said. "The only way you can get a good product is to find the right blend."

In the past, she has baked cookies, muffins, brownies and other goodies.

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Last week, she began experimenting to find the right combination to bake dinner rolls, breads and cakes for the pantry. But first, she plans to try it at her home first before baking them to sell at the Kitchen Pantry.

Recently, Elliott also experimented with an oatmeal cake to serve in the pantry. As part of the ingredients for the oatmeal cake, she uses an all-purpose flour blend of tapioca, sorghum, rice and cornstarch.

Elliott said when making gluten-free baked goods, it's better to keep it in smaller portions; otherwise, it has a tendency to rise beautifully in the oven but then fall apart.

"If you keep the portions smaller, it's not as likely to do that," she said.

To come up with the combination of flour, she sometimes creates it or buys it already packaged; however, the cost of the blends of flour is quite expensive. For example, a 4-pound bag of flour cost $12.95, which does not go very far.

"That's the main thing I have to be concerned about," Elliott said. "There's another ingredient or two that helps with certain things like cakes, muffins and quick breads that helps stabilize and it's called xanthum. It's a powder that's made from a plant that grows in Mexico."

The 1-ounce bottle of xanthum costs $5.95, which does not last long either. It looks like baking powder, but she uses the xanthum in addition to baking powder, which makes it rise. Xanthum helps keep it there, she said.

She began her journey with the celiac disease in 2008 when she discovered her problem.

"The first thing I said was, 'oh my .... what am I going to eat?' There were no diets for it," Elliott said. "At that point, there was also nothing available for recipes. I finally found a couple books at the vitamin cottage that told me how to work with it. It had recipes that I tried. Some were successful. Some were flops so I wasted a lot of flour before I found out what really works and what doesn't. So this has been an expensive learning process, and I'm still learning."

But she continues to work with the combinations to create goodies, not only for herself, but also for those in the community. Those who would like to try Elliott's gluten free baked goodies can find them on the shelves at the Kitchen Pantry.

"I do what I normally do and sometimes it works," she said. "Sometimes it doesn't then I have to try other ways to overcome the problem.

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